Operation Fireball

THE CAR’S HEADLIGHTS
picked up a raw-ribbed coyote slinking across the highway. It turned its head and grinned slaveringly at me as I drove past. Just beyond the lean beast I saw the route marker. The sign on the shoulder of the road indicated that California Route 395 continued straight ahead to the north. Route 190 branched off to the right, toward the northeast. I turned right.

A lighted phone booth five hundred yards along Route 190 stood out like a ship’s beacon. I pulled off the road near the booth and considered my next move. The slow disappearance of daylight had eroded my confidence proportionately. The trip that had seemed like such a good idea that morning now felt considerably less than that. An unannounced visit … and especially after the circumstances of our separation …

I leaned across the front seat and opened the glove compartment. My knuckles brushed aside the Smith & Wesson .38 special in the compartment as I dug out a small, pucker-string leather bag filled with quarters. I got out of the car and walked to the phone booth. There was a moon, expansive but not full. Atmospheric dust haze gave it a blood-red hue.

Inside the booth I found a dime in my pocket. “I’d like to place a long distance call, operator,” I told the tinny, disembodied voice that eventually came on the line. “Person-to-person to Mrs. Hazel Andrews in Ely, Nevada. I don’t know the area code or the phone number.”

“Do you have the address, sir?”

“No. It’s a ranch outside of town.”

“I’ll try Ely information, sir,” the voice said doubtfully. There were multiple clicks in my ear. Even inside the booth the night air felt thin and biting. I had just driven through Olancha. Off to the west in the reddish moonlight loomed the indistinct dark bulk of Olancha Peak. The road map listed it at 12,200 feet. On the rim of the desert where I stood all was silent.

There was another click and the tinny voice returned. “There is a Mrs. Charles Andrews, sir. Would that be her?”

“Make it your best bet of the day, operator.” Hazel was the widow of Blue Shirt Charlie Andrews, the gambler who’d bet ‘em higher than a duck could fly. She was also the widow of Lou Espada, the taciturn man of mystery who’d left her stocks, bonds, and the prospering Dixie Pig, a saloon in Hudson, Florida. I’d met Hazel at the Dixie Pig. “Let’s try it.”

A long wait followed. Then a deep voice said hello. I’d forgotten the contralto range of the voice. “I have a long distance person-to-person call for a Mrs. Hazel Andrews,” the operator announced.

“This is Hazel Andrews,” the contralto said. “Who’s—”

“That will be sixty-five cents for the first three minutes, sir,” the operator said to me.

I shook a few quarters out of the leather bag and deposited three of them in the largest receptacle in the coin box. Each quarter registered with a musical
bong
. “Hi,” I said when the receiver stopped chiming in my ear.

“Hi?” the contralto said on a rising note, indicating fast-gathering impatience. “What the hell do you mean, ‘hi'? Who’s calling me long distance?”

“Still the same low boiling point,” I said admiringly. “D’you have any trouble finding people to get mad at these days?”

“Who
is
this?” she demanded, but I could sense a dawning awareness struggling with disbelief.

“Kaiser made three in those days, Hazel.” I heard her quick intake of breath at the reference to my dog, who had had many a bite of steak from Hazel’s plate. “The name is Earl Drake,” I added before she could blurt the old name into a possibly tapped telephone.

The deep voice was almost a whisper. “It’s really you?”

“It really is.”

The voice picked up steam. “Where are you?”

“Halfway between San Diego and Ely.”

“Don’t you move,” she ordered. “You stay right there till I come get you, y’hear me? How many miles? Where are you staying? I’ll start right—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” I interrupted her. “I’ve always wanted to see the ranch.”

There was a second’s hesitation. “I’ve had visitors,” she said. “None recently, but—”

“They should be tired of it by now. I’m in the mood to risk it, anyway.”

“I’m in the mood for you to be careful,” the deep voice said. “Why no word all this long time, man?”

“Because I knew you’d be having visitors.” She was silent. “Hazel?”

“Yes?”

“You won’t know me.”

“I won’t—oh, because of the burns.”

“Correct.”

“You just get here and I’ll show you who knows who!”

“You’ve got a contract. Tomorrow afternoon.”

“My spread’s straight north of town about twenty miles. The Rancho Dolorosa. You’ll recognize it by the bleached-out cow skeleton at the highway gate. Just slip the wire and drive in.”

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

I hung up and went back to the car.

I felt charged up.

Really charged up.

The idea that had started me over the road from San Diego that morning seemed to be turning out every bit as good as I’d hoped it would.

• • •

It was four o’clock the next afternoon when I drove up to the bleached-out cow skeleton. I’d sacked in at midnight and slept for six hours, then got back on the road. Route 190 joined Route 95 at Beatty, and Route 95 crossed Route 6 at Tonopah. On Route 6 it was a straight shot into Ely, and twenty miles north of town I reached the turnoff into the ranch. Most of the driving during the last part of the trip had been at altitude.

I eased off the wire loop that served as a gate latch, drove inside, then closed and looped the gate again. When I climbed back inside the car, I opened the glove compartment to check on the position of the Smith & Wesson. Its reassuring solidity thumped the back of my hand. It wasn’t likely that anyone would still be paying attention to Hazel after such a long interval, but it wouldn’t do to take anything for granted.

I drove along a winding dirt road for half a mile, then topped a rise. The ranch house lay in a valley below. It was a sprawling building with an added-onto look. All its paint had not been applied at the same time. A huge barn with a cavernously empty look stood to one side of the house. On the other side was a small stable. Through the open door of the stable I could see the rear ends of a Corvette and a pickup truck.

There was no sign of life as I drove down the hill and parked near the barn. I opened the car door and got out. Then the kitchen door of the ranch house burst open and Hazel came flying down the gravel path. The gleam of her flaming red hair was like a signal rocket. Her six-foot figure was adorned in its usual uniform: tight Levis, a buckskin vest that left the smooth white skin of her big arms bare to the shoulders, and cowboy boots studded with silver conches.

“God, man, it’s good to see you,” she said huskily, slipping an arm around my waist. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have known the face.” She squeezed me. “But I’d have known you the second you got out of the car, even if you hadn’t phoned. Who else moves like a mink in a chicken house?” She tugged at my waist. “Come along into the house.”

We walked up the path arm in arm. Inside, Hazel led me directly beneath the kitchen’s overhead light. She tilted my head back and studied my features. “Oh, well, you never were a beauty,” she said philosophically. She patted my cheek. “Like I’ve missed our good times together, man. Why didn’t you get in touch after you broke out?”

“Because I knew you’d be having visitors.”

“A likely story!” she snorted. “I’ll bet you had a blonde stashed away somewhere.” She smiled at me.

I smiled back. No one knew better than Hazel that I didn’t have a blonde stashed away somewhere. Women have always been a sometime thing with me. Sometimes I make it with them, sometimes I don’t. With a metabolism like that, a man stops pushing.

When I met Hazel in Florida, I was trying to run down a crooked deputy sheriff named Blaze Franklin, who had killed my partner while trying to make him divulge the hiding place of a sack loaded with cash from a bank job in Phoenix. Hazel was running the Dixie Pig in the neighborhood. She did great things with food and she served honest drinks. We hit it off from the start, but it was she who was the sexual aggressor. Even after I stumbled at the first hurdle, she didn’t quit the team. Then we got the thing in gear, and our relationship became the best I’d ever had.

It didn’t last long. I got Franklin, but during the process I was pan-fried and charcoal-grilled when my getaway car burst into flames from a police bullet in the gas tank. My face took the worst of it. In the prison hospital I had to play vegetable until I found a clever young Pakistani plastic surgeon on the staff who made me a new face. For a price.

I was in drydock for two years. I never let Hazel come to see me. She’d had no part of my action, but I was afraid her outspokenness would get her in trouble. She’d known I wasn’t a hundred cents on the dollar as far as law and order was concerned, but she hadn’t cared. When she finally realized that I wasn’t going to let her get through to me, she packed it in. She sold the Dixie Pig and went back to her homeplace, the ranch near Ely.

It was six months after I broke out of the prison hospital before I finished paying for the face job. It was another six months before the heat died down from the way in which I acquired the cash to pay for it. I held a legitimate job for a while to stay off the skyline, then drifted to the West Coast. A few days ago I’d started thinking about Hazel again. It didn’t take too much thought to make me feel that the time was ripe to contact her again and find out if I’d forfeited the ball game.

Hazel pushed me into a chair and started bustling around the kitchen. She paused in the act of opening the refrigerator door—she had an eight-foot walk-in refrigerator like a butcher shop—to take another look at me. “I’m still having trouble matching up that familiar voice with a strange face,” she said. She went inside with a platter and came out in a moment with two steaks which overhung it. “But I have a feeling the face will grow on me,” she continued. “Like tonight. D’you mind eating early? I have plans for the balance of the evening.”

“Plans?”

“Plans.” Her smile on a man would have been called a leer. “Now you just—”

The kitchen door opened and a man’s figure loomed in it. I was halfway out of my chair when Hazel spoke again hurriedly. “Hi, Pa. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Earl Drake. Earl, this is my father, Gunnar Rasmussen.”

I straightened up and held out my hand. The man in the kitchen doorway had stopped at the sight of a stranger, but he shambled into the room for a handshake. He was tall but stooped. Snow-white hair surmounted a head that could have graced a Roman coin if Roman coins had featured several-times-broken noses. The old man was dressed in a plaid work shirt, bib overalls, and gum boots. The pressure his hand applied to mine belied his age. “Pleased t’ meet a friend of Hazel’s,” he rumbled, and turned to her. “I’m goin’ out t’ the feed shed and bring in some hay on the stone sledge.”

“Don’t be late,” she cautioned. “I don’t want you that far away from the house after dark.”

The old man grunted, threw me a half-wave and a smile that indicated his opinion of feminine solicitude, and went out. “You never mentioned a father,” I said.

“Did you think I sprang full-blown from the back of a bucking bronco? Actually, Gunnar was my mother’s second husband, but I’ve always called him Pa. He refuses to live in the house since Ma died. He fixed himself up a place in the barn so he can be close to the horses he raises.”

“He looks like a rugged old party.”

“He is. Or was. Even a few years ago nobody this end of the state wanted to take him on physically.” Hazel shook her head reminiscently. “The trouble is that he refuses to act his age now. He still thinks in those terms.”

“What kind of horses does he breed?”

“Not the kind you have in mind,” she said, smiling. Hazel and I shared a common background and interest in thoroughbred race horses. “These are draft horses. Blue ribbon stock. Percherons that weigh over two thousand pounds apiece. It’s a hobby with Pa. He shows them at the county fairs.”

“This is his house?”

“It was. Plus the half-section here that I was raised on. When Ma died, Gunnar deeded it all to me. Then when Charlie Andrews had his heart attack in the middle of his best winning streak ever, I took that cash and bought up all the adjoining acreage I could get. Pa is the self-appointed overseer. I keep telling him to relax, because the spread covers eighteen thousand acres now.”

I whistled. “What can you do with that kind of land?”

“Lease it for grazing, mostly. And some of the onetime wheat acreage is in the soil bank. The land itself keeps increasing in value all the time. I get offers to sell every month, but my business manager says the land is worth more than the cash.”

During the conversation Hazel had been moving swiftly about the kitchen. A tablecloth appeared upon the formica tabletop, then silverware. The steaks had been turned and home fries were sizzling in a skillet. Hazel motioned to me. “Put your feet under the table.”

“Why’d you tell the old boy you didn’t want him too far away from the house after dark?” I asked as I approached the table.

“We’ve had trouble here.” Hazel deftly forked the sputtering steaks onto platters and heaped up mounds of browned potatoes beside them. “Cities don’t have a monopoly on wild, violent kids. A couple of months ago Pa heard a horse screaming during the night. He rushed out of the barn and found a bunch of kids laughing at one of the mares who was down inside the paddock fence. They’d broken her leg in five places with an iron bar. Sheer malicious savagery.”

The aroma of good beef tantalized my nostrils as I sat down. “Pa almost caught them at it,” Hazel continued, sitting down across from me. “He did get close enough to recognize a couple of them, and he turned their names in to the sheriff. That’s when the trouble really started. Harassment. Phone calls all hours of the night threatening Pa with the same sort of thing that happened to the mare if he didn’t call off the sheriff. That just got Pa more riled. These damned kids are vicious enough, though, that I don’t want him out on the spread by himself after dark.”